How Blue Prism rolled out a global payroll system in 3 weeks with minimal disruption
to its payroll operations
"Payzaar has enabled us to have a standardized payroll workflow, to demonstrate segregation of duties, to meet internal audit guidelines, to have proof of every action taken, and to manage our third-party vendor relationships better"
Like 70% of multinational companies, Blue Prism operates a hybrid international payroll environment. In most countries, the company has outsourced payroll processing to different in-country payroll providers (ICPs), leveraging their local payroll, tax, and compliance expertise. In other countries, Blue Prism is processing payroll in-house with its own team using third-party software.
Blue Prism opted for this hybrid approach because the company values having greater operational control over the payroll in its largest locations, and the ability to customize its payroll workflow whilst setting its own cut off dates.
"Being able to be in touch with our local providers and keep some regions in-house allows us for greater control and accuracy, and shorter processing times"
"I was very insistent that I wanted to keep our two largest locations in-house to ensure control and quality and that wasn't an option with all these other [global payroll] providers. They would not allow us to act as the 'in-country provider' for those two regions"
The Challenge
“There was no standardization in the data, it was all PDF files coming from our providers. It was all very manual, pulling data out of those PDF files to check that everything was done correctly”
"If the CFO would ask me for a report, that would mean going through every country's individual data, trying to pull the costs together. It was really difficult, and as we kept growing with more countries it became more and more difficult to put things together. We were spending many hours just pulling data and trying to make something useful for the senior leadership with it."
The Solution: Plug & play global payroll management
- Being able to overlay Payzaar on top of Blue Prism’s existing in-house payrolls and provider network, integrating them into the platform without having to re-implement them from scratch.
- The ability to function with a hybrid payroll delivery model, combining elements of Blue Prism’s own robotic process automation solutions to gather their data, for both their in-house and outsourced Payrolls
- Powerful, highly customizable reporting and analytics that enabled the payroll team to use data from a variety of sources and build dashboards and reports in minutes instead of hours.
- Accounting Connect – Payzaar’s payroll-to-finance integration module, which allowed Blue Prism’s payroll team to serve data to finance and integrate it into its reports.
- Significantly shorter time-to-value than traditional vendors, with the full rollout taking weeks instead of months.
“Working with Payzaar gave us that flexibility to either work in house, have it outsourced, and be able to consider future change should we identify improvements or find a suitable global provider… There was a high degree of flexibility with Payzaar and we quickly started to see the benefits that could bring.”
Payzaar’s technology and ICP-agnostic approach allowed Blue Prism to connect all its existing payrolls through the platform and obtain standardization, visibility, and control with minimal disruption to existing processes and systems.
The Implementation: Rolling out a global payroll solution in three weeks
The rollout was led by Blue Prism’s central payroll team with support from Payzaar’s implementation team. Thanks to the easy click & drop configuration, no IT resources were required to get the platform up and running – the process was handled entirely by the payroll team with Payzaar’s support.
During the rollout process, Blue Prism’s team configured the workflows for each country, setting up their payroll calendars and user permissions for approvals and sign-offs for each step of the workflow, automating information flows between the organization, to the central team and the in-country providers that produced the majority of Blue Prism’s payrolls.
“We got the system up and running in 3 weeks and we were able to do it without getting IT involved. That was a big win for us in front of the rest of the organization because usually it would take months.”
The Results: Clearer payroll with better oversight
Better oversight and controls: Before implementing Payzaar, payrolls were validated and approved by the payroll team without internal review from other departments. Payzaar’s approval system and audit trail has enabled them to involve regional financial controllers in the sign-off process, improving quality and oversight.
"We have a very sturdy system that's capable of carrying us through an audit or demonstrating segregation of duties and a line of approvals"
“Now there are about 20 users within the organization, and many more people who benefit from the kind of data we can obtain"
Key Wins
- Stronger, more standardized workflows with built-in segregation of duties and full auditability of every action taken along the way
- Better management of 3rd party vendor relationships through consistent, transparent processes and central information exchange hub
- Reduction of time spent producing reports for management, from often spending 10+ hours per report, to less than 10 minutes
- Hundreds of hours saved every year responding to ad-hoc data requests from different business stakeholders. – “Actually, thousands of hours potentially, because the organization is much bigger now both in terms of headcount and countries”
- Much improved data visibility and access across the organization. – “It would have been impossible to get the level of data we can access right now without Payzaar”
- Since implementing Payzaar, Blue Prism has more than doubled its headcount and has been able to service this growth effectively without needing to scale the payroll team
Sector: Technology
Number of employees: 1100
Number of countries: 21
Payzaar products used: Operations Control, Reporting, Accounting Connect
